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Originally submitted in the course

LING 904: Pragmatics,

Master of Applied Linguistics,

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

August 1996.

E-mail: m487396@Rocketmail.com

In October of this year I organized and administered oral mid-term examinations for my 320 first-year basic English language students at Inha University, Inchon, South Korea. I will discuss the pragmatic concepts that effected the design and implementation of their test, how pragmatic concepts shed light on the kinds of performances they produced, and how my conclusions will effect the design of their upcoming final exam. 

In 1996, the Korean Ministry of Education introduced the requirement that all freshman students be required to take one year of basic oral English Language training. This training is to be made up of two class-hours of instruction each week during the two 16 week terms. Once holidays, English department exams, non-English department exams, and university social and sports functions have been subtracted, this comes to about ten weeks of classes, with about an hour and forty minutes of class time per week.

In our department, which was set up for the first time in February this year, there are currently sixteen instructors of English conversation. Each instructor teaches up to ten classes of up to forty freshman students. I estimate the total number of students in the program to be about four-thousand. The students are drawn from a variety of mostly technical majors like Engineering, Computer-Science, and Physics. Students majoring in English Language, Literature and Linguistics are taught in a separate program.

All students in Korea receive training in English grammar and vocabulary from middle-school (Junior-High) onwards. This training is profoundly non-communicative. There is a heavy emphasis on intensive rote-memorization of vocabulary and unanalyzed phrases, and on passive, multiple choice, taped, listening examinations. Since it is currently illegal for high school students to study at private language schools (and most would not have time anyway), unless they have had the opportunity to travel overseas, their chances of having studied with a native speaker of English before coming to university, or of having been exposed to communicative learning activities and testing methods, are virtually nil.

I teach roughly three-hundred students broken into eight classes of about thirty-five by major. Due to the fact that none of my students is actually majoring in English, lack of student motivation is an extreme problem for me and my colleagues. Because of this, and an unfortunate choice of teaching materials by our departmental administration, the instructors have decided to develop their own separate curricula and testing procedures. Many, including myself, have decided to dispense with the set classroom texts entirely.

In the past, examinations have taken the form of taped, multiple choice or short answer listening tests. These are in the process of being phased out and replaced by some form of spoken conversation task. The number of students involved makes it impractical to hold individual student interviews, so we are experimenting with various forms of dialogue based task prepared by pairs of students.

I have argued strongly against individual interview tests both for reasons of practicality, and for several reasons related to Pragmatic concepts of Politeness, and Activity-Type.

Regardless of what role we might like our students to take on, they will still interact with their instructors from a position of deference or negative politeness (Scollon & Scollon, 1983: 166). Their assumptions about social distance and differences in relative power and status are based on twelve years of schooling, and are not going to be changed by wishful thinking on the part of their western instructors. Korea is a highly hierarchical society, and virtually all students adopt deference politeness strategies when dealing with their instructors. This is especially true for first-year students who have only recently graduated from the rigidly controlled high school system, and even more true in an examination situation. Their deference strategies include making minimal assumptions about what the instructor actually wants and what is relevant to the instructor, and in minimizing impositions on the instructor (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 70). Consequently, they are reluctant to take control of discourse. Rather than a chance to see the student practice discourse functions such as turn-taking, topic control, and fore-grounding and back-grounding of relevant information in a two sided conversation (Scollon & Scollon: 159-65), the oral interview test becomes a one-sided interrogation. This is compounded by the fact that beginning students do not have sufficient control of the modality system of English to hedge their communication with redressive forms and phrases. They know that the only utterances they have are the Bald-on-record (Brown & Levinson: 69) forms of basic sentence structure, and most lack confidence with even these.

An examination is a classic "gate-keeping encounter" as discussed by Scollon and Scollon (1983:157). The power differential and social distance perceived by the student is widened by the new roles of examiner and examinee that the instructor and student have taken on. It is open to the same danger of a politeness related "double-bind" that Scollon and Scollon describe (177-8). Students who respond with too much deference "may be punished for being silent, withdrawn, indirect, vague, or even hostile." On the other hand, students who respond with excessive solidarity may see themselves as "disrespectful of the teacher's authority."

As a solution to these problems, I have argued that students should interact with a person of symmetrical power and social distance (Scollon & Scollon: 169) in the exam situation - that is, with a peer rather than the teacher. This allows the instructor to examine the students while taking on a coaching and facilitating role rather than an adversarial one. Students in the familiar situation of interacting with their peers will respond to the lack of power differential and minimized social distance with co-operation and negotiation of discourse functions rather than excessive deference or "taciturnity" (170). They will be far more likely to take control of the conversation, and to use back-channeling, and repair and clarification strategies to aid their communication. In fact, my students managed to keep their English conversation on track with the occasional word or two of Korean that they slipped in whenever the conversation was in danger of breaking down.

I have argued that because of students' preference for deference politeness strategies when talking with their instructors in an exam situation, individual interview examinations take on the character of an "interrogation". Because of their perceived role in this speech event, their contributions to the conversation are highly constrained. The instructor retains control of topic, turn-taking, the choice of what is relevant, and the over-all direction of the conversation. Also, the situation shares with activity-types like cross-examinations, the fact that the information asked for by the examiner is already known (Levinson 1979: 380). College students tend to have similar life-styles, and instructors usually know their students fairly well by the time they come to examine them. This, and the fact that students tend to stick to "safe," uncomplicated answers anyway, can make examining large groups intensely boring.

There is a further problem in that the objectives of the student, the apparent objectives of the instructor, and the instructor's underlying objective, are in conflict. As Levinson (383) would put it, the activity assigns goals to the participants which produce underlying strategies which are in conflict. The student's objective is to answer the questions while avoiding mistakes, and to get out of the exam situation as soon as possible. The instructor's apparent objective is to engage the student in a conversation based on course content. The instructor's real objective is to get the student to produce enough data on which to base a course-grade. Often this data is purely linguistic in nature, for example, the use of particular tenses or vocabulary. Thus, the student, who is unfamiliar with the situation, searches for a way to make appropriate contributions while being unsure of exactly what the instructor wants her to talk about and how she should phrase her answers (cf. Levinson: 388). All she knows is that she had better keep things short and simple because she does not want to make mistakes. She is not helped by the fact that her instructor does not actually care about the content of her answers, but merely wants to get enough linguistic data on which to base a grade. As anyone who has ever done interviews to place students in different class levels knows, this sometimes produces the absurd situation of instructors trying every trick they know to engage a student in conversation while the student tries equally hard to stick to one word answers.

Because of these underlying conflicts, I would argue that an interview examination is what Levinson (376) calls a "marked context". That is, one in which the Grice's Co-operative Principles are distorted or even suspended by the nature of the speech-activity and the conflicting or unclear roles, goals and strategies assigned to the participants.

As an alternative to individual interviews, I decided to set my students a couple of simple language tasks to be performed with another student. I will discuss only one of them. I had spent a considerable amount of class time teaching them to describe and ask questions about the permanent qualities of things and people. By this, I hoped to be able to teach them to solve vocabulary problems by interactively describing and asking questions about words they had forgotten or did not know. I built up this skill by having them play a series of simple describing and guessing games with objects, pictures, and people. They played the games with a partner or in small groups. Their task in the exam was to describe a small set of pictures of simple objects to their partner, and get their partner to guess what they were without looking. I made it clear that I would help them if they got into difficulty.

This task has several advantages over the traditional student-teacher interview. Firstly, students work with someone of equal status and low social distance. Secondly, students are performing a familiar task, and one that encourages them to co-operate. I hoped that this would produce less deference and a more interactive discourse. I hoped that in addition to the linguistic features I had taught, I would be able to observe discourse features such as how they handled turn-taking, pre-sequences, repair strategies, clarification and formulation of gist (Cook 1989), and back-channeling. The results were mixed.

Unfortunately, because of excessive background noise, the more than sixteen hours of tapes I made were of too poor a quality to provide useful transcriptions. However, with the aid of my notes, some observations can be made.

Most students had some difficulty in negotiating turn-taking. They preferred to have me designate who would start the game and showed considerable hesitation and embarrassment if I did not. Within the game, each student had three objects to describe to her/his partner, and they were often surprised that I did not designate which object to choose first. This is in spite of the fact that they had practiced similar exercises without my explicit direction in class. Once and object had been completed, some students showed confusion when I did not direct either them or their partner to continue with the next one. Clearly, in the exam situation, they expected me to retain the role of director and sequencer, even though I had tried to place myself in the role of coach and observer.

In spite of my encouragement and prompting, most students preferred to describe their pictures to their partner and have their partner listen until s/he was ready to make a guess. Only the most confident students used questions of any kind. A few students made attempts at clarification or repair sequences with phrases like "No, no, bigger...", "No, not a cat, cats eat this..." I did occasionally hear what I assume to be brief clarification sequences in Korean. I had made it clear to them that I would not penalize them for this. I attribute this lack of question formation to two factors. Firstly it greatly simplifies turn-taking. Each student can simply listen while his/her partner describes. Secondly, I assume there was some interference from their general expectations about what it means to be a student and to take an examination. Korean students are not expected to ask questions, they are expected to provide an answer when their instructor demands one.

Less confident students provided very little back-channeling or feedback for their partner. Some, in fact, provided none at all. In spite of my attempt to make this a co-operative exercise, some students saw their best strategy to be staying quiet while their partner did the task and they were ready to complete it with an answer and change roles. This is in spite of the fact that most students had had a lot of noisy fun with similar games in class. It would seem that some students felt that their role as examination subject outweighed their role as co-operative participant and placed great constraints on their contributions.

Most students preferred to keep their descriptions as simple as possible. For some this meant sticking very closely to the language I had taught them in class, and for some this meant sentence fragments or solving the problem with as few words as possible. More confident students took pleasure in showing off what they were able to do with the language and seemed to completely forget about the utilitarian phrases I had taught them. This was something I had mixed feelings about considering the effort I had invested in teaching them the linguistic features I was testing for!

In spite of being presented with randomly chosen sets of pictures from a very large set, all the students completed the task relatively easily. Very few got seriously stuck at any point. Clearly the task was familiar enough to them to make it easy to complete in one form or another. Naturally the students saw the task in different terms than I did. They saw it as a test of their ability to complete a the functional describing/guessing task in English. I however saw it as both this, and a test of the grammar and vocabulary I had taught them in class. This would account for the fact that only some of the students stuck closely to the language I had taught, yet all were able to complete the task relatively easily.

For their final exam, I have set a similar picture based task focusing on expressing location and actions in progress. I have decided to emphasize the co-operative nature of the task and to encourage them even more to use questions and clarification sequences. This task is more difficult, and I do not expect that they will be able to complete it without taking an interactive approach. I have made it clear to them that this is what I'm looking for.

I have also encouraged them to think of the task in linguistic as well as functional term, and made it clear to them that they will get points for the quality of their language rather than just for whether they can complete the task.

Finally, I have rehearsed the task with them in class several times, and I will have a couple of more confident students give a quick demonstration to show the others how to handle turn-taking and feedback.

Giving my students a task to perform in co-operation with another student gave them a chance to interact someone of symmetrical power and social distance. This freed many students from the constraint of traditional deference politeness strategies and allowed them to express such discourse functions as back-channeling, questioning to control the flow of information, repair and clarification, and for some, turn-taking. In spite of my disappointment that they were not all as co-operative and interactive as I had hoped, they were much so than they would have been had I interviewed them individually. Some of them even had fun, and we laughed when none of us could think of the right word, or when they came up with a particularly ingenious way of describing something. I expect that after a little fine tuning, their final exams will be even more successful.

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 Brown, P and S. Levinson. 1987. " [from] Politeness: Some Universals in Language usage."

Cook, G. 1989. "Two views of discourse structure."

Coulthard, M. 1985. "Speech acts and conversational maxims."

Coulthard, M. 1985. "Conversational Analysis."

Levinson, S. 1979. "Activity types and language."

Scollon, R. and S. Scollon. 1983 "Face in interethnic communication."

All sources reprinted in Candlin, C.N. and K. Willing. Pragmatics: A book of readings. Macquarie University, School of English and Linguistics, M.A. in Applied Linguistics.

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